Being in the 'Disposal Industry', I not only get to work around a lot of people whose names end in vowels and to sample smells that would make a normal human being heave their stomachs out of their bodies, I also get multiple industry magazines sent to my place of work at the rate of about 3 per week. They are mostly pretty routine stuff; ads for equipment, reviews of equipment, stories about new community recycling programs, etc.

A while back, I wanted to post a story that completly bagged on the UK for having the worst recycling record in the west. Unfortunately, that magazine's website didn't duplicate articles, so I couldn't post a link and I had to give that one up.

But this month, 'Waste Age' has a wonderful article on a reclaimation project in Beruit. Here's a quick snippet from the article entitled "Reclaiming Eden".

"During the civil war, the West Side of the city couldn't move waste to the processing plant in East Beirut, so people threw their garbage into the Mediterranean Sea, explains Amine Bouonk, a project manager with the San Francisco-based URS Corp., which has been retained to reclaim the dump. "The landfill wasn't built, it evolved" he says. Random dumping began in 1975 and continued until 1993. Refuse included day-to-day trash in plastic bags, medical wastes, animal carcasses, unexploded munitions found after battles and construction debris from buildings destroyed during the conflict. One of those buildings, the Normandy Hotel, gave the dump its name: the Normandy Landfill."

Strange. Throughout the enite decade of the 1980's, I never heard a word from the Greenpeace weenies or others of their ilk complaining about the dumping of raw medical waste into the Med. I know it was half a world away from America, but they had to have known about it.